1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the use of energy-based electrosurgical instruments. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed to the use of stand alone energy-based tissue clips to provide energy to seal, cauterize, ablate or destroy cells and/or tissue.
2. Background of the Related Art
Surgical staplers are widely used to join or bond tissues together and to provide hemostasis of adjacent tissues. These staples can be employed in combination with electrosurgical stapling apparatus where thermogenic energy is utilized to provide short-term hemostasis and sealing. One drawback of using staples is that staples generally remain inside the body.
Another method of joining or bonding tissue is based on radio frequency (RF) energy applied to tissue. Existing RF energy-based tissue sealing instruments utilize metal electrodes combined with jaws which grasp and hold sealed tissue. Energy-based tissue sealing involves compressing tissue to bring vessel walls together, heating compressed tissue by RF current up to the temperature of denaturizing and mixing of collagen and elastin, and cooling down and solidification of the melted collagen and elastin to form the seal.
This approach has several disadvantages which are inherent to most energy-based sealing instruments. Compressing and heating of tissue takes considerable time in which the surgeon has to hold the instrument and wait. This may interfere with the continuous flow of a surgical procedure. In order to reduce sealing time, power has to be increased that may result in higher risk of thermal damage and to more bulky instrument and generator designs. Additionally, after several cycles of successive sealing, the jaw members of the electrosurgical instrument may become overheated and a surgeon may need to wait until they cool to avoid poor quality sealing and thermal damage of adjacent tissues.